Time and Colin Clout: Pastoralism of Spenser's The Shepheardes Calender

Abstract

Arcadia is a figment of the poet's imagination, a fiction to project the idea of perfection, or perfect otium. There is one exception, however, and it is that Arcadia, too, suffers from the limitation of time and that the Arcadians have a recurring sense of the everlasting presence of Death. The Renaissance sensibility wanted always to be reminded of the human temporal predicament, to see the skull under the face, as it were, and its writers were fond of quoting an anonymous speaker who averred his ubiquity by the well-known phrase, "Et in Arcadia ego", in which the speaker is, as Panofsky says, Death." "I, too, was in Arcadia" -if this was the 18th-century reception of the Baroque melancholy, turning it into a sweet yearning for the lost Arcadia, the truly Baroque sensibility had Death for its speaker triumphantly proclaiming "Even in Arcadia I am." The ineluctible passage of time destroys even Arcadia. Arcadia thus becomes an exemplum that temporality is the condition of human existence, an evidence of the inseparability of time from human experience.